All right. Let's, let's hop right in. Given we have a tight calendar here. Savneet, thanks for joining us once again at the, at the conference. Let's hop right into it. For those not familiar, can you just give a brief snapshot of PAR and what PAR is?
PAR is a platform to run your enterprise restaurant. We sell software and now AI-related products to enterprise restaurants. Think of that as restaurants greater than 50+ units, and we cover everything from front of house, which is loyalty and online ordering, to the back of house and point of sale. Our goal for the last number of years has been to integrate these solutions to more of a unified platform as opposed to a bunch of disparate services.
Great. We'll spend some more time on the strategy in a minute. Let's kinda talk about some current events. You reported Q1 earnings last week. Anything you wanna anything stood out that you wanna talk about with the group here?
I mean, I think we had a great quarter. We I think beat expectations, you know, pretty substantially then gave guidance that was better than expectations. I think maybe the critical points to highlight in the, in the quarter were obviously our, I think our guidance was very strong, sort of reiterating our belief that we are taking, continue to take share and continue to move really rapidly to have more and more free cash flow over time. I think the second major takeaway is we've I think truly seen the ability for AI to take out some costs from the organization.
We talked about our OpEx coming down every quarter, where, you know, we are, you know, being pretty precise, not sort of AI washing everything, but actually finding areas where we can move that cost down over time. I think that'll be a nice thing to see our revenue pick up and our costs come down. I think the third part is we are, you know, very rapidly evolving to deploying AI products within our customers. We announced we've got about a few thousand customers on them today, and, you know, we wanna get to our free product in 50,000 customers by the end of the year and but really start monetizing as we get to Q4 next year.
Let's unpack your guidance comment because you took the step of initiating guidance for the first time. How did you think about that decision? Why was now the right moment to give guidance?
You know, we wanted to make sure we had good visibility before we gave our first look of guidance. You know, I think we wanted to feel that we had a strong backlog, but also really good immediate term, immediate visibility. We had that, and we felt very good about that. I think the second part was, you know, when you give guidance, you know, I think you wanna have a better chance of hitting it than missing it, we felt pretty good that we were in a good spot there. I think the last part was, you know, we have a tremendous confidence in what we're building and seeing in the market today.
We wanted also to make sure the market saw that visibility from us, which is, you know, we wouldn't give guidance that was, you know, above what people expected if we were concerned about some of the stuff that people are concerned about.
Makes sense. The second piece of what you said earlier was around AI. Can you spend a little bit of time about or on PAR Intelligence?
Sure
What we're seeing in the market and customer uptake from that? Separately, how AI is impacting you all internally, in some of the cost saves you described.
Yeah. First, you know, on the customer side, which is, you know, the more exciting side, you know, we released PAR Intelligence, which is sort of in many ways our AI orchestration layer across everything we do. What we've found is that, you know, we sell it to a customer base that is very, very ROI sensitive, meaning like if we can prove ROI, they'll pay for it. If we can't, they won't. There's not like a, "Let me try this out," kind of thing. It's a very, very exacting customer base. I think that's actually great because we believe we can demonstrate ROI. A lot of what we do is we go to our customers and we've seen really rapidly how interested they are in using our products. You know, today, I'll give you an example.
In our engagement side of our house, which is our loyalty and online ordering side, we've got about 1,700 customers using our product. You know, we could double that overnight, but we're slowly growing it and training it to remove hallucinations using our unique customer data so that our insights are real. As an example, what that product has done for our customers is that historically you'd have a loyalty software and you'd say, you know, you download a bunch of reports and sort of figure out what your campaign profitability was, what your repeat visitors were, your did you increase frequency? Did you increase LTV? Did you lower CAC?
You just prompt it, you got all that in beautiful graphs and stuff. You can go the step forward and start saying, "Hey, who should I segment this campaign to?" "Hey, can you build that segment for me? Can you actually build that campaign? The copy, should it be an SMS? Should it be an email?" It does all that now through AI. That's a really unique tool. The time to build a campaign is not weeks or months, it's days. The way we've looked at that for our, from our customer perspective is that version one of our AI products, which are out already, is just giving that ChatGPT-like interface on everything we do. That's table stakes.
I think everyone will have, you know, everyone's calling them agentic, but it's just a, you know, prompting for the same information you already had, but with a little bit more. Phase II will be the ability to have predictive insights, meaning instead of you prompting, it's coming to you and says, "Hey, there's a snowstorm, you know, next week. Do you wanna order a bunch of hot chocolate and send a message to your labor that they should plan backup transportation?" That's sort of phase II, where how are you predicting what's gonna happen? Phase III is running that actual action where it's like, "Yes, order the hot chocolate," message our labor pool to make sure they show up.
And at that point of action is where we wanna start monetizing, and our goal is to get that going this year. That's the customer-facing stuff. I can give you a million examples, but it's really neat to already see how much efficiency we've gotten from labor. Just again, the low. I think that maybe we've really lowered the bar to be an expert in running a restaurant. Now anybody can go talk and figure out, you know, learn about marketing or operations of a restaurant. Internally, I think we've been, you know, equally excited. You know, I think, you know, we in many ways, we've been playing around with AI for a very long time.
You know, I look back, you know, we did our first, you know, ChatGPT demo to the whole company in October of 2022. You know, I think like everybody else, we were like it was fun to play, but we're trying to figure out how the hell do we like actually cut costs. We really started to get escape velocity from that, you know, end of last year, beginning of this year, where we truly were replacing things that we did as with bodies or with vendors with actual agents or AI tools. You know, a couple great examples are a lot of our cyber analyst work now is agents, not bodies that we're going through logs and stuff like that.
Our HR team is down 20% because we were able to remove all the query stuff, the front line, we built tools to pull the information from our HRIS or the other tools. Our HR spend is down 20%. Our finance team is down 25%. A lot of that is, again, you know, we shipped our collections team to India last year, that team will be down, you know, a meaningful percentage 'cause now we realize, well, we should've never shipped it to India. We should've just started moving it this way. We've actually been able to find jobs that we can, you know, potentially remove or vendors. Our CPQ tool we no longer pay for. On our hardware side, we built that ourselves.
You know, we had a tool that managed all the manual We sell, you know, part of our product is selling hardware and services to all these big brands. We had, I don't know, a $200,000, you know, tool for manuals and images. Now that's all an agent that we built, you know, called Hi Tim. We've been able to continue to find these areas of products. Our procurement tool was something we built internally ourselves. We've been really precise about measuring what is actually cost cutting just to restructure and look good, and what is actually something that was actually AI creating a better experience for a lower cost.
Then one more question on AI. You touched on this a little bit, but how is deploying AI and utilizing AI with enterprise restaurants different than anything for SMB restaurants?
Well, I think the biggest difference, I don't think it's a challenge 'cause I think over time it's an opportunity, but is that in an SMB product, you can just push the product and the customer takes the product. It's not like, you know, you've got a small business you can tell, you know, Jack Dorsey, "Hey, don't put that feature in my product." You just, you get it and you're stuck with it. At the enterprise level, everything needs to be approved by the corporate. You know, obviously it can be slower going. Obviously we haven't seen that yet. I think it's actually a better opportunity because you can then partner with that institution to create enablement, prove ROI, and actually sell more stuff.
You know, SMB has a limited amount of stuff they can spend money on. You know, the enterprise restaurant is, you know, we sell five products today. If a customer bought all of our products, it's, you know, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000, maybe $11,000. You know, that's less than 1% of the average QSR restaurant's total revenues, when the retail chains are at 8%. You know, the way I look at that is, like, we just have a long way to go. We feel pretty confident we're, like, stumbling in that right direction and that enterprise market is still so early.
Like, you know, we're still dealing with customers that, you know, one of our newest customers still has a backup data center in the headquarters they're building. You know, there's that aspect of it. The other part of it is because they don't, they didn't develop any bad habits 'cause they didn't have modern tools, now some of them it's actually faster to move to this agentic world because you're not disrupting, you know, you're going from like a log to AI.
We spent a lot of time on the restaurant side. Let's also talk about the C-store side. You recently announced PAR Drive is in 1,700+ .
C-stores. Talk a little bit about that product and also just in general what you're seeing on the C-store side.
Yeah. C-store's been an amazing category for us and, you know, I expect it'll grow faster than our base and it's our most profitable side of our business. You know, it's been a faster, a fast grower, higher, highest margin product, and I think a lot of that is driven by the end market. It's an end market that is not nearly as competitive as restaurants, so you don't have tons of startups trying to build software for gas stations. You can occupy unique mind share of the customer because they don't have 10 people telling them, "Hey, I can be your AI partner. I can be your AI partner." We're really there. The other part is that these are brands that have avoided technology for an incredibly long time.
If you think about it, most of us don't have our gas station's loyalty app still. As these businesses have evolved, they started to see the disruption coming from electric charging, seeing the disruption coming from food. They've all expanded their offering to be more like a retail store, more like a restaurant, and still be a gas station. They realize that they can't still sit still acting like you're just gonna come into gas 'cause you have to get it. They started investing in loyalty tools to make us all come back and say, "Get a pizza, get this or that." As we started realizing, we were like, "Wow, these are higher margin businesses, much simpler to run.
Like, we can give them the tools, and they will actually pay for that ROI. That made it super exciting for us to launch PAR Drive. PAR Drive is, you know, it's really a PAR Intelligence product that literally lets the C-store query any bits of information they have. What's been exciting about it is that in a C-store, unlike a restaurant, you ostensibly can sell anything. You can sell toilet paper, you can sell gas, you can sell alcohol, you can sell legal drugs. Like, there's like literally anything you can sell, versus a restaurant, it's a pretty defined set of stuff. As a result, you can actually create more ROI because there's only so many times I'm gonna go in and get my whatever salad that I love from that restaurant a week.
I could infinitely go to a gas station to get everything I need for my life. What's neat about that is you can constantly keep querying the agent and say, "How do I optimize to sell to Neil this, and this?" In reality what you're doing is figuring out, "Hey, help me organize and segment my customer base so that I can maximize LTV and maximize all the stuff that's in front of me." One of the really fun examples we had early on was in that space, CPG companies are constantly giving you marketing spend for to promote their products. One, our first customers, I think had spend from Altria, one of the big tobacco companies, that they hadn't used.
The AI prompted them and said, "Hey, you've got these millions of dollars you haven't used yet." They're like, "Oh, crap. Like, that would've just gone out the door if we didn't know that." It's an amazing tool because it lets you say, "You've got expiring inventory over here, run a promotion there." Or it'll say, "Hey, this customer used to be an active customer or active loyal member. Now they're not. Let's go target them." Those customers are getting a ton of value, and we are more the governor on growth there because we are training on all of their proprietary data. We're working very hard to remove all the hallucinations and so that we can actually then take that into a much larger audience.
Let's transition a little bit to your recent M&A. You announced the acquisition of Bridg earlier this year. Just talk about what Bridg does and how it fits into PAR's platform.
Yeah. Bridg is critical to PAR Intelligence. We wouldn't never have done it if it didn't fit into sort of this AI vision we have. Bridg is an identity resolution product, meaning it has the ability to identify users, no matter if they're in a loyalty program or not, by using the publicly available data that exists within your credit card companies and other data sources. Why is that valuable? Well, instead of you going in there and being some anonymous customer, we can now say, "Hey, that's Neil. He's married, he's got two kids. His average basket size at our competitor's is $100, but he's only spending $50 less." It allows us to then target him more holistically.
Why we bought it was originally our view was, you know, if we're the largest loyalty company in restaurants, we only have a view of your loyal customer base, which is, call it, 20% of your customers. Now we give you a view of those 80% that you didn't know. That's super powerful because now you can market to the 80%, but you can also then optimize your menus to target them. You can figure out how to have a better operation schedule. But at the same time, we're then enriching the data of those loyal customers. If you're a loyalty customer, we know your spend at our restaurant, we know how often you're there. We probably know if you have got kids and all that stuff, but we don't know what your spend is outside of our restaurant.
Now we can use Bridg to figure out, okay, man, we thought you were loyal, but you're way more loyal to our peer down the street. Let's figure out why that is and target. It, one, really solidifies our loyalty business as like it's going to be really tough to compete with us now. Two, in an AI world, all that data is so much more powerful because now we can literally charge you for those conversions, charge you for a lot more. Bridg will be the first part that I think we start to monetize within PAR Intelligence.
Got it. I think there's some pretty obvious cross-selling opportunities there. Just talk about the opportunity for Bridg within your installed base and any early signals you're seeing from your customers.
You know, Bridg actually started out as Early on, had a lot of restaurant customers, and then it was acquired in 2021, had some challenges after it was acquired. it sort of lost its way, I think is probably the easiest way to explain it. as soon as we announced the acquisition, you know, we, you know, we've done a number of acquisitions over time. We'd never been like I never had customers call me and say: "Hey, can I get the product?" I, you know, I probably had 12 real, you know, serious restaurant chains come to us and say: "Hey, can I be the first one to use the product once you close?" That was kind of interesting.
When I would ask them, a lot of them had heard the product from years ago or used to have the product, but they just didn't have the right customer setup or, you know, just had a bad experience with the prior way the business was run. That was kind of interesting because I did not expect that. The second thing that kind of happened was one of our largest loyalty customers in restaurant signed up for a pilot right away and now has signed up as a customer. That was like, wow, this is like really interesting. We thought we would have to first integrate these products, make it one dashboard. We've already started to kind of sell a little bit of it to see how are they using it.
I think we're way ahead of schedule. I kept saying it'll be accretive to our growth in 2027, I think in our profitability in 2027. I think it could potentially be accretive to our growth in 2026, you know, way ahead of schedule given how much organic demand there is for a product like this. This kind of choppier economic environment, while it's generally good for QSR restaurants, there is more pressure to increase traffic. There's more pressure on that revenue side. This is an area they're going to want to put more money in, so we might be a beneficiary of that as well.
That, that's a good segue. Can you spend just a minute on what you're hearing from your customers in the macro environment, traffic trends, softness they're seeing?
You know, QSR had a tough run in 2025. You know, I think it's one of the first years that traffic was down. Ironically, it was our biggest bookings year ever, I think many of our peers had good years too. In these kind of challenging years, they actually invest in technology because again, restaurants don't buy tech for fun. It's got to bring down costs or increase revenue. There's like literally there's no fun spend. You know, there is no like, you know, let me go play with some tokens. Like it is you're making money or you're not. In those choppy environments, it's been there. At the end of Q4, we saw stabilization. We saw the decline start to stabilize. That continued through Q1.
A little bit of a bump for the tax refund, not really. It's just, it's been stable. It's, you know, it's still not at the point where, you know, historically traffic was growing 1%, 2% a year. It's roughly, I think as I just looked at the data this morning, it's like up 0.5%, which is perfect because it's an environment where they're going to be spending a lot more on tech to kind of juice that up. That's the QSR side. My guess is the sort of full service dining side, is gonna have some challenges this year. Whereas last year, full service dining was a share gainer versus QSR, which historically makes no sense because last year was a more challenged economic year. You'd expect QSR to do well.
What happened was that the full service dining chains had lowered their price point to be competitive or near competitive with quick service. You go to Chili's instead of going to, you know, your favorite burger chain. The QSR chains got very aggressive on their value meals, very aggressive on their loyalty, and they've kind of starting to pull that share back. Full service dining could have a more challenging year because they did have a natural, you know, big year last year.
Keeping on the customer theme, you had a recent large win with Papa John's, which sounds like a great win. Can you talk a little bit about the process to win that deal? Also in that answer, just talk about your go-to-market in general and how processes look.
Yeah. I mean, our sales cycle enterprise deals is a year, 18 months. It's a traditional enterprise cycle. It's an RFP. There's, you know, half the time a big consultant like an Accenture or someone in the mix, half the time a smaller consultant that's sort of restaurant focused. Very similar on the C-store side where it's sort of, you know, year-ish long sales cycles. What was unique about this one was that we historically have not been in the pizza category. You know, it probably sounds silly, but pizza is actually a little more complicated or different than QSR. There's all sorts of modifiers and changes. Most of our traditional peers, Oracle, NCR Voyix, Global Payments, didn't really have a pizza solution. Most of the big pizza chains had their own custom technology.
Domino's obviously a very famous example, but Papa John's is another example. You know, they basically had saw the success we had had at Burger King and said, "We want to replicate that." We sort of said: "Listen, we think we can do it. We haven't done it in pizza before, and you'll have to wait for us to get all this product out the door so we can, you know, like we can actually build pizza functionality for you." I think they had a bunch of reference checks, talked to our customers, talked a lot to Burger King, and in fact, eventually brought over some people from Burger King to do this. I think it was a testament to, you know, if we say we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it.
I think that's a hard thing in any enterprise software business, but we are really, really built on that. I think second, it also shows this, you know, I hate to say it, but the bar is kind of low. Like, you know, when would a, you know, a big enterprise take a leap of faith on a vendor that has never done that before to, you know, say, "Hey, we'll wait for you to build it and take it"? But the third part, I think the most important part of this was, you know, Papa John's CIO is an incredible visionary. Kevin Vasconi, he was a CIO at Domino's in their heyday. You know, he's on stage with, like, the Google Cloud guys all the time. He's put edge compute in the restaurant before anybody else.
He's a real, like, visionary. You know, he chose to partner with us, and I think that's important because it sort of shows how much investment we have in sort of the AI capabilities of our product, so that, you know, we can help make his vision come true. You know, it was a shorter sales process, but also they were in an acute need. They had lost a ton of share. We will start rolling them out at the end of this year. We'll hopefully be fully done by the end of next year.
Does that entry into enterprise pizza, if you will, does that spell some other opportunities for you?
Yeah. We announced two more pizza chains on our call, smaller ones, &pizza and Pizza Factory. You know, I think we'll have more to come. You know, again, we, nobody ever thought of calling us for pizza until, you know, February, whatever, we put out a press release. You know, hopefully in a year or 18 months we'll have more of these. Absolutely the pipeline is building in pizza. Very fun and cool to see that. Again, it's just not nearly as competitive as the spaces we play in today.
Any commentary you can give on just the size of the Papa John's deal and also the cross-sell opportunities it provides?
It's about mid-teens of revenue when fully rolled out annually. We sold two products, loyalty and POS and Back Office. It's a combination deal. Again, you know, one of the most interesting things about our business is the last three quarters that we've reported, the vast majority of deals have been multi-product. I think this quarter it was 90%. The last quarter it was maybe 80%. They were another testament to that. You get so much value when you have your products under one roof as opposed to a bunch of disjointed products. You know, I think we continue to see these enterprise brands do that.
Moving on to the next customer question, Shake Shack. Great signing with Shake Shack for loyalty. Similar question. Just talk about that deal and what it implies for the overall business.
Yeah. I mean, I'll answer categorically in the sense that, you know, loyalty is so important to a restaurant. It is like, you know, it is the 80/20 or close to the 80/20 in the sense that your loyal customers drive so much of your success. It is also one of those tools where if you don't have it, you are at a competitive disadvantage versus your peers. You know, if you know, your kids are hungry, you pull at a rest stop, the average American family is going to figure out which one they have, they're loyal to and shop there. As, I guess, tech has evolved, what you can do with loyalty has changed dramatically. Back in the day, it was basically a discounting tool.
It was almost cheapening your brand, you know, it was not a good way to build affinity to what your brand promise was trying to deliver. Recent technology has really changed that in the sense that you can now build these programs that are so look like they were built exactly for that human being. The app can look different for you than it looks for me. You can have loyalty sign up at the register. You can have secret menus. You can have experiences. You can have games. The breadth of these products has gotten insane. That really helps the largest company in the space because if we have the largest company, then we have the best R&D budget, we can kind of do everything under the sun and more.
In the loyalty space, our what we've observed is actually our win rates have gone up. You know, in this last quarter, our win rates were 50%, which is, you know, insane for an enterprise product. You know, they've moved up considerably. A lot of that is that at the enterprise level where we play, just there's just a lot less people than there used to be competing with us. The ones that still compete with us have really kind of moved down. Now, Shake Shack isn't, you know, a 10,000 store chain or anything like that, but they have visions to be large and, you know, and I think they needed a partner that could kind of scale with them as they went. You know, I think it was a no-brainer.
Obviously super biased there. You know, they're an incredible brand. They have done super creative stuff, and I think in many ways have been, you know, hamstrung by the tech stack that they've had. Hopefully this allows us to partner with a super innovative brand, but also I think kind of continue to prove that we are both really great for, like, the super brand. You know, we're really good for an enormous chain like a Wendy's, but also really great for a hyper-growth, you know, smaller chain like Shake Shack.
One more on our customers. Just Burger King obviously gets a lot of focus from investors. Just give us an update on the rollout of POS with Burger King and Back Office.
POS has gone incredibly well. We talked about on our last call, we're averaging about 400 stores a month right now, which is, in our little part of the world, like a crazy accomplishment. You know, we expect to be done with the majority of the chain by the end of this year. Everything's kind of gone as planned and as hoped. You know, they continue to be the best reference customer we have, which is, you know, amazing to have them be the one getting on the phone with Papa John's as an example. It's been awesome. Back Office, we'll start to see the pickup in the second half of this year.
It's been a ton of work for us to figure out how to map to all the different store varieties, the menu varieties, also how everything is done differently. Burger King's an older chain, so you got a lot more stuff you got to learn, but that will be a nice revenue addition for end of 2026, 2027. I kind of like it 'cause you have these layers of growth. And again, I think it's an amazing proof point that, you know, our Back Office product is not, you know, in 100,000 restaurants. It's in, you know, 10, 15, 12 or 13, 15,000 restaurants.
Burger King chose to use our product versus a standalone Back Office only product because how they saw the value of the combined solution giving them, you know, everything from single sign-on, but 1 database, giving them such an ease of use and as a result, a bunch of cost savings. I think that will be the kind of playbook going forward, which is anyone buying POS will probably should buy our Back Office because, you know, reduction of systems. In an AI world, I would argue having those two places and having one agent across both of those is probably the way to go.
All right, I'll do one more question before I turn to the audience. Just zooming out a little bit. Pipeline, particularly amongst T1 restaurants and also pipeline on the C-store side. Any comments you'd make?
Pipeline is really strong. On the restaurant side, it's very diverse. We've got, you know, a lot in the small and medium size, and then we have, you know, two or three very large deals. Hopefully we'll hear from a couple of them by the end of this year. The pipeline continues to grow, and it's interesting. You know, we used to hope for like one of these T 1 like deals every year to get in the pipeline. You know, I think we're gonna see multiples of that every year now. I think it's just because people have gotten comfortable with this idea of let me go build a modern restaurant as opposed to let me wait a few years. I don't think you can wait anymore.
I just, again, I think AI is making it so hard to wait. You know, the pipeline is very strong, but what's been kind of fun is this sort of, this is sort of medium enterprise area has become super lucrative for us because we can now sign, you know, a 100 store chain, sell them four products, and we're making the same money we'd make on enterprise chain that was just doing POS. It's, you know, really, really lucrative for us to sell into that market. It's good to see a very balanced pipeline there. On the, on the retail side, it's, it is equally very strong.
I think what's exciting there is we've got, you know, one or two very large deals that we want to get done, lock in our growth for the year and more. What's exciting on that side is, I think we'll see more rapid adoption on the AI side there. That's where we've got customers, you know, banging the doors, wanting the products. Again, we're first, you know, trying to minimize hallucinations, train on real data. That, I think that could be a potential added lever of growth for us. On the PAR Intelligence side, within that PAR, I think we could be surprised.
All right. Anything from the audience? Yes.
I'm just curious, like longer term strategically, it seems like you described kind of the competitive landscape as like the smaller one-off solutions, you know, and then on the other side, you have like the big fintech platforms, the Oracles, the legacy solution. You guys kind of sit in the middle a little bit. I mean, like, how do you think about the competitive landscape evolving? I mean, do you think you're kind of playing both sides of that? Or where do you win typically in these RFPs?
I mean, our competitive landscape is predominantly dominated by Voyix, Oracle MICROS Simphony product, and Global Payments. You know, I would say none of them would describe themselves as a sort of a payment company, but most of the majority of the revenue they get from the enterprise restaurant space is software. You know, Global, we displaced at Burger King, you know, that was a software deal that, you know, may have had some processing, but it was, you know, that was a software deal. In the enterprise side of restaurants, you know, payments is not a guarantee versus you're selling POS to your random local restaurant, you're guaranteed to get the payment revenue. Most enterprise deals you're not.
In that business, I look at us as the more modern version of what those guys have built, which is they were a cool product 10, 20 years ago. We're the modern version of what that should look like, and we're the way to bring you into this AI future. We are, you know, predominantly taking share from those firms. You know, I can't think of a time we've lost, you know, we've churned a customer to them. It's, it's been a really nice kind of we're the insurgent in that kind of established call it brownfield market. On the other side, though, you know, I think you've got all sorts of, you know, SMB players that will try to come upward.
You've got Toast, which I think will win a enterprise deal a year or two, you know, one or two a year maybe. Again, like harder for them to figure out how to go from SMB to enterprise. You've got Xenial, you've got, you know, a few others out there, some startups. I think we kind of straddle the line between the sort of the emerging potential emerging competitors and then like the big established people that have all the market share today and everything to lose.
Other questions? All right, so maybe I'll do a couple more on my side. Talk a little about the global opportunity and international, your progress since the acquisition you guys made.
Yep
What you see.
Yeah, you know, I think there's clearly a need for a global enterprise solution in the category we serve. There's not a, you know, there's not really a Toast. There's not really a, you know, an Oracle or NCR out there that has true global services. We, I think we have the ability to become that over time. We have a nice burgeoning business in Australia and New Zealand that's on POS and Back Office called TASK, continues to grow. We've even had to slow down growth as we've worked on some very large opportunities. I think that opportunity will be there.
The challenge globally is that you need to pick your spots, meaning, you know, you don't want to uncertain , you only want to win the U.K. You know, you need volume of stores.
One of the things I'm excited about is I think AI, though, will potentially change that, which is back in the day, if we were going to go win a deal and be your global provider, we would be so excited to have U.K. and Germany and France, and then it'd be like, "Oh, crap, how are we going to do Estonia and all these smaller countries that are amazing places to be, but like not a lot of, you know, Burger Kings there." You know, AI potentially makes it a lot easier to do all the stuff like languages and fiscal calculations and taxes and all that stuff. You can potentially go there faster. Short, long answer, but we are growing there. We see a ton of opportunity.
Like if I went to our U.S. customers and said, "Hey, we got a global presence," more than half would say, "Yes, please. Like, let's go." Because they just don't have a solution there. The other part of our global business, we provide McDonald's loyalty in 68, 69 or 70 different jurisdictions. The business grew really nicely. You know, I think we're one of the, you know, one of the vendor they're probably most happy with. We've grown really nicely and really hopeful that that relationship expands, hopefully beyond loyalty and other stuff over time. International has been like a growth opportunity. You know, I think we've just had so much opportunity right now in front of the United States that we have never yet slowly gone. I think it'll grow at company rates.
We'll keep it, but it won't be a, you know, it'll probably we can push that growth up. There's just so much opportunity right now that we, you know, I don't I think we got to nail what's in front of us.
You touched on this a little bit, but talk about product development. You know, what gets you most excited? Where do you see the solutions that expanding in the near term?
Listen, it's, I think it's really, really exciting to be a software company today. Obviously, you know, provided you're not looking at your stock price. I think that if you are actually into the idea of software and AI, if you're excited by this moment, you're not like, "Oh my gosh, how do I convince people to buy my stock?" You're focused on, "Holy crap, I can change everything we do." You know, we at PAR are very much in that latter camp, which is like, "Holy cow, let's change everything we do." I'll give you an example. In one of our product groups, you know, we've, you know, taken a scrum team of, we call it eight- 10 people and cut it to two people.
It's a test, but it's working, which is we have, you know, what we would once call a product manager, using AI to build the PRD, then to architect the product as an agent, then to build the product as an agent, then to QA the product as an agent, and at the very end is another human. We took those eight-10 people down to two. They're shipping products super fast, and it's working. It's really cool to be like, one, we can build all these fun, cool products for our customers, but actually, what if we change the way that the organization runs? I'm a big fan of like talking about CEOs, about what's their organizational design, how do you create compound value over time?
AI is like kinda transforming how we look at product development. The other part that I think is super interesting is I do think a large part over time of feature development will be completely automated. Meaning, you know, today, you get customer tickets for all sorts of issues if you're a software company, and those trigger a Jira ticket. Like let's just say you have, you know, it's a tiny company, it's 100 Jira tickets, and there's, you know, 40 for the first and 30 for the second. The agent can just grab those tickets, deploy without you ever knowing. It's 'cause we're working 24/7, and you know, it's like that's where we're trying to get PAR to, which is the sort of maintenance stuff is completely automated. There's no human in the loop.
It is just done. The core, you know, kind of visionary product, we're still there. I'm really psyched about this idea of rethinking how we build a software factory. Because, you know, we went from this sort of, you know, waterfall development to agile to the next thing, the next thing. I think this is the next wave, and this could be a cool way. Also how we design humans and, you know, I think it's also making us question how we run our management teams. You know, the number of people that can report into an executive has definitely gone up. I don't think it's like, you know, NVIDIA, where it's like 60, but like you can see just how much has changed.
You know, I built an AI agent for myself that literally tells me what is the most active Slack channel, who is an employee that was super active on Slack that's not anymore. I call it my employee churn alert. I can say, "Hey, like Neil, what's going on, buddy? How you doing?" 'Cause if that person's important, they're not typing, you know, sending messages, then I know what's going on. You know, I get all of my emails prioritized and then drafted responses within Claude, not within that. All of these ideas came out of just seeing how we could automate all this stuff on the product development side. It's also helping us automate like just the, you know, boring life of, you know, a non-technical person.
Awesome. I think we're at time. Appreciate your time, Savneet Singh. Thanks for coming.